Two Hours to Make: A Reflection on the Past Two Months at Renaissance West and Looking forward School Opening

We are in our second year of Renaissance West Community Makes.  We are really starting to build some trust in the community.

We learned last year that makes with few directions were the ones where kids really embraced the tenants of make as we see them - tinkering, iteration, creation.  With that in mind, our first Community Make Events were thematic.

September was based on George Ella Lyon's poem "Where I'm From."  The children wrote their own "Where I'm From" poems and created fabric flags representing "Where I'm From."  We collected all of this amazing work into a LuLu book that can be found here.  This book is in the community library and several copies will be in the school library when it opens in August 2017.  It was a raging success in our opinion with about 30 kids attending, a lot of fun and some truly inspired writing and art.

October was based on the election.  Again, raging success. Around 30+ kids creating poignant writing, art and film. Tons of fun. We participated in the NWP's Letters 2 the Next President Site. Students had the choice of simply writing a letter letting the next president of the United States know what issues where on their minds, making a short movie, or creating a piece of political art.  But we only had two hours and that did not leave time for real discussion of what we were doing and planning.  What we ended up with was a collection of beautiful pieces  in support of  Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton, but very little about actual issues.

This could be seen as a fail, but I choose to see it as an opportunity and a learning experience.  First, the opportunity.  We spliced everything together into the short film below and sent it to the Clinton campaign.  The children's voices were indeed heard on a national level, which was a out main point. Kids have things to say and deserve to me heard.  The children used their powers of literacy and created things to act on the world.  They learned about political art and the learned how to operate the computer program to make the movies.




This is all pretty exciting, but what are learning is even more exhilarating.  In these makes where we want to dive into the complexities of literacy and really act on the world around us, we need more time.  A two hour 1 and done activity is fun and engaging, and learning happens, but I want more.  I want to really get into the culture of iteration, literacy, tinkering, reflection and social justice.  We need more time.

So - Two new ideas. . .

1) Community Events that cover two months where kids can start things in Part 1 and then revise in Part II.

2)  Summer Camp.  We have big plans for that this summer.  A grant is being written.  I'll leave it at that

3) Out-of-School Time once the school opens.  We will have TIME then.  Everyday kind of time for big iterated projects.  Oh I just can't WAIT.

Tinkering and Traditional Learning

At this moment, I am working on a new book about make in the middle school classroom while my personal middle schooler sits beside me working on science.

One of the things I'm writing about is the idea of tinkering in the formal learning space of school and hacking the idea of traditional school.

The boy's assignment is about as traditional as you can get.  He is to read the section in his Science text book and answer the questions at the end.  Sigh.

However,  he and I have been talking as he reads about what he's reading.  The section is about diffraction, refraction and reflection of waves.  Waving our hands around and drawing pictures, we've been playing with the ideas and trying them out.  Tinkering.  Trying, failing, making a mess with our drawings, and trying again.  Someone walking into our workspace would see traditional school, but if that person were to observe for a moment, they would see authentic learning through trying out and trying on.

The key, I'm thinking, is the reflection on what we were doing.  How learning was happening (and make no mistake, I was learning too as I am no expert on waves).  How tinkering is learning and how that is a natural process that learners use.  

Reading and answering questions is not authentic learning for sure, but tinkering with the information to figure it out and figure out the answers to the questions - the process that happens underneath that very traditional assignment is.  So my question and what I want to keep thinking about - how do we value that tinkering?  How do we pull it out into the light and make it THE thing that we are pointing to accessing rather than the answers to the questions?

Renaissance West Community Events

For the past school year, our Writing Project site has been partnering with Discovery Place Inc, a local science museum, to offer out-of-school-time community events at a new Purpose Built Community in Charlotte, NC, the Renaissance West Community Initiative.

Man - that was a lot of links.

I'm the ethnographic researcher for this project.  A k-8 public school is being built in the neighborhood and is scheduled to open in August 2017.  The idea is to hold monthly community events around literacy and make in order to foster a community of learning before the school even opens.  I have a lot to say and a ton of data to work through this summer, but I wanted to start with this video where the children of the community show us what learning is all about.

The Yogi Writer/ Maker - a Revision to Reclaim my Identity

Running and Writing.

I suffer an identity crisis every time I read this piece.  It is the opening of my first book and people who have read it come and tell me how meaningful the analogy is to them - and that always follows with the dreaded question - "So how's the running going?"

The truth is, I don't run anymore.  So then I'm compelled to tell the story of how I blew out my hip on a run when I tripped over the dog and now hot yoga is my jam.  I even published a Digital IS resource about this identity crisis.

It occurs to me now, five years into yoga and nine years after the book was published that there is an analogy to be found in yoga and writing AND in making and writing. It's all in the idea of practice.  Yoga is a practice.  There is no race  or competition to train for.  You simply show up each day and practice your craft.  You listen carefully to your body.

Writing and Making - composing if you will - is a lot like that.  You show up each day and your practice your craft.  You listen to what your soul is telling you to create.  You speak the words that are there - composing carefully.

Sometimes you fly in your yoga practice, nailing each pose with a strong flexible body.  Somedays you are stiff and wobbly and your side crow crashes into a face plant.  On those days you have to revise your practice, to reiterate it.  You have to listen closely to your body and let it tell you what it is capable of this day.  You have to weed out the distractions that are making you wobbly, you have to find your drishti.  But most of all, you continue to practice in the way your body will allow that day.

Sometimes your words or make fly together, speaking out to the world about ideas of importance.  Carefully crafted statements of social justice fly onto the page or into the make.  Somedays, nothing works.  The glue isn't right, the pieces fall apart, the words won't come.  On those days you have to focus on revision and reiteration.  You have to listen closely to what your soul is telling you and get one word down, one piece put together.  You have to try it out and see if it works and if it doesn't, you have to try again.  You have to silence the distracting voices that tell you that you have nothing to say.  But most of all, you continue to practice your craft in the way that your mind will allow that day.

The biggest lesson for me as I've grown from the running analogy to the yoga analogy is a spirit of playfulness.  When I read that running piece I am struck by the hard work, the slogging through pain.  Yoga is playful and so should writing and making be.  It's a choice, approaching with this spirit of play.  Making a mess and seeing what will happen is the heart and soul of writing and making.  And that sense of play is far more encouraging to me as a writer and a maker than the drudgery of trying to craft perfect words or compel myself up a monster hill.  

Is it a "Make"?

I wrote earlier this week about a "make" I did with a group of high school students using literary terms to create stop-motion videos.

I've been wondering out loud for days - is this a "make" since I gave them the instructions to produce a stop-action video that exemplified their term?  In my mind one of the things that makes a "make" is the freedom to get in there and mess with things to see what happens without a lot of instructions.  I've been wondering if my attempts to make "make" "count" for school had gotten in the way of the play and tinkering I discovered this past summer.

As a group the UNCC Writing Project has identified a "make" as something that "invites students to make things with words, with natural and man-made materials, and with their ideas of how to make their worlds." (from Intersections Grant)

Check.  Students worked with play dough and legos to represent their ideas using a stop action app.

Further "make" "gives students opportunities to play with, try out, or represent ideas through physically and digitally making things and then sharing drafts in progress" (from Intersections Grant)

Check.  Students played with the play dough, legos and apps and shared their drafts in progress with each other and with our Google + community.

Finally, "make" "use[s] content specific to grade levels' course of study and are literacy rich, asking students and teachers to share, reflect, loop back, remake, revise, remix, and connect with others." (from Intersections Grant)

Check.  Students used the literary terms specific to their course to do all of these things as they created their videos - several different iterations over the 40 minute period - and shared those videos with others.  While they were working, I wished for a boom mic to drop down and record the rich and conversations they were having about not only the literary terms, but the materials they were working with and the process they were going through.

Below is a simple video with some of their reflections.





So while in the beginning I was feeling like this assignment was just sort of on the spectrum of make because it was "assignment-y" I'm feeling now after really breaking it down like it was a real and powerful making experience for the students and for me.

Making Our Words

Looking at a stack of literary terms a teacher wanted her students to learn and thinking about our Educator Innovator Project along with some cool stuff a colleague of mine, Steve Fulton, was doing with stop action video  I thought, “why not make stop action videos with the literary terms? 

I've written here about my thinking on making, its importance, and curricular connections. Since that posting, I've gotten a lot more comfortable with "make."

Our Educator Innovator grant is focused on the concept of “make” and its connections to the ELA classroom.  In our minds, our students will become Hacktivists, hacking into materials and creating products that act on the world for social justice in some way.  At its core English Language Arts is about acting on the world.  Too often students see the course as reading literature that is completely disconnected from themselves and answering questions about it, or perhaps writing and essay about it.  They do not see the literature as examples of ways authors are acting on the world around them and they certainly don’t see their own writing (and making for us) as the literature of the classroom.  The concept of Hacktivism gives us a chance to make the acting on the world front and center in our classrooms.

But, as I planned the lesson for the stop action literary terms, I was struck by all that I was asking the students to do in about 40 minutes.  I was asking them to learn the stop action app (We used Lego Movie) choose materials from boxes of legos and play dough, define complex literary terms and then find ways to represent them in a stop motion video.  This seemed a bit overwhelming, but I really felt strongly about exposing them to the idea of Hacktivism, so I offered bonus points (always a good incentive) for anyone who could work in the Hacktivist angle.  What surprised me was the way in which the students lit up at the notion of Hacktivism.  Granted, this could have been because they were seniors and they have to have some sort of service angle in their senior exit project, but many of the students simply seemed excited about having an avenue to act on their worlds.

One group of students created the following video about the term deus ex machina.  In the video, not only do they resolve the conflict with an improbable event, (the moon falls from the sky and crushes the policeman) but they speak out against prejudice against non-traditional relationships through the interspecies relationship they represent in the video.

We posted all of the videos up to a shared private Google + site where the students could view and comment on one another's work.  The videos became the literature of the class and one of the avenues by which the students could see the literary devices in action.  They were also able to see one another acting on the world through the videos and comment on that aspect of the work.

For me, all of this hacking, making and learning comes back full circle to the notion of author's purpose and why the concept is so key to what we do in ELA classrooms - making our words.

Confessing Making

I've spent the past week working with the teachers from our Partnership Schools on an intense focus of Making STEAM.  The maker movement has been alive and thriving in our group.  Currently the daybook I'm drafting this post in is flashing red, blue and green through the pages as a result of a paper circuitry make using copper tape and LED's to remind me of my new found comfort with play.

You see, even though I've been messing around with make for the past year, I've had this nagging feeling somewhere way in the back of my head about its curricular connections.  On Tuesday in Lacy's workshop I read a piece from Tinkering:Kids Learn by Making Stuff that really did a great job of connecting up the power of make for nontraditional students.

We work with a lot of "at-risk" kids, rough kids who are falling through the cracks of the system.  We actually seek out these kids because we see that they are often quite successful at tinkering, using tools, making a project work, and adding new ideas.  It is clear that often this success is new to them and that it builds confidence.  This sort of confidence is solid-not the ephemeral sort that comes and goes with an authority figure's praise - for after a successful tinkering experience, there is no question of the student's capabilities.

This confidence, this lack of doubt about a student's capabilities is what's missing for so many of our school children who are shown daily that they aren't smart by the testing industry.  In this context Make seems like not only a cool way of learning and connecting up curriculum in ways that grab student interests, but an essential way of teaching and learning if we mean develop student identities in each and every one of our students.

Quilt Making at the Maker Faire- Where's the Science?

Yesterday the UNCC Writing Project held a Maker Faire.  My make was story quilt blocks.  We had tons of fabric  from my mother and mother-in-law and the kids had a grand time writing 6 word memoirs and then making quilt blocks to represent them.  There was tons of cutting of fabric and fabric glue involved.  So what I'm wondering is where is the science in this make?  

Making at Discovery Place

Our Writing Project is really embracing the Maker Movement.  One of our major projects is "Making STEAM" a partnership between some K-12 schools and Discovery Place - a local science museum.   A lot of the time I feel like I'm still trying to figure out what "making" is, but this field trip with some 8th graders from Kannapolis really helped move my thinking forward.  There were spaces all over the museum where the kids could "make."  Legos, blocks, duct tape, tin foil and crystalizing paint.  The students just dove in and created all sorts of things.  To me, this is the heart of making -  experimenting with materials without too many instructions as to what to do with them.  The kids were learning all sorts of things about that materials and structures as they created.  Physics, Chemistry, Art - it was all in there.  Amazing and humbling to watch.  

And they are making major connections on our Google + Community.  They took tons of pictures and notes in their daybooks and came back to school to "make" picture collages to post their reflections.  It's amazing to see that they really do "get" "maker."